Oh boy... and you thought that the Australian roads were unsafe for
cyclists...

Short background: All my life (until I moved to Australia that is),
I have been a fanatic ice-skater and rollerblader. In the winter
on the frozen water, in the spring, summer and autumn on the road
and bicycle tracks. And life was good :-)

Then I moved to Australia, where there is no frozen water nor bicycle
tracks... In the first years, I used my bicycle to go everywhere
(within reason). And got a lot of abuse from it from the car drivers.
So much, that when my bike got stolen, I didn't bother to replace
it, and walked everywhere. Yes, it took three times as long, but
it was a million times less stressful.

Recently I found my backpack with my rollerblades in it. This weekend
my wife and baby went to Canberra for a bridge contents (she, not
the baby) and I thought "let's rooooooooolllllll.". Oh dear.

In the summer in the Netherlands, it is easily light till say 21:00
- 21:30. In the summer in Australia, it is barely light after 19:30
during the longest day. In the Netherlands, on the roads you have
on constant distances street lights. In Australia, you have street
lights on corners. Now the problem with rollerblading is that you
go fast (unintentionally) and then a little bump in, or rock on,
or gravel on, or whatever on the road has to be anticipated. Not
seeing them is the same as asking to fall flat on your face.

In the Netherlands, in general, outside suburbs, the cars are not
parked on the side of the road but in parking bays which are not
part of the piece of the road where car drive. In Australia, roads
are two-and-half-times as wide as a car and these cars are parked
on the outsides of the cars. With the result that on the left hand
side you have parked cars and on your right hand side you have cars
driving. And since the favourite car of the Australian citizen seems
to be a four-wheel-over-two-meters-high-landrover-tank, you have
absolutely no idea what is happening on the at the car ports.

Last but not least, the Netherlands is flat and thus the roads are
flat. Rollerblading there means: if you put effort in it, you go
faster. If you don't put effort in it, you will go slower and slower
until you're standing still. This might take some time, but it will
happen. In Australia, even if you find a long stretch of road which
looks flat, it's not. It's never flat, it's always sloping. So even
if you don't put effort in it, you will go forward. And faster. So
if you see something which might take some caution, you will go
faster and faster to it, and faster and faster. Even a little stretch
of say 30 meters will give you a nice speed when you're at the end
(and not able to see what is going on on that road due to the
stupidly high four wheel tanks).

So... first attempt to rollerblade again in Australia has turned
out to be a huge disappointment. Tomorrow I'll try the road to
Kurnell and see if I can figure out the four kilometer track in
Miranda...

As the saying goes, the content on commercial television station
is to fill up the time between commercials. And I've seen some sad
examples of this here in Australia.

Australian Television

On free-to-air television in Australia you have seven channels:

The ABC is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, government owned but not government ran, is like the BBC and is commercial-free. Lot of programs and series from the BBC show up on this channel.

The Special Broadcasting Services is the channel with forwarding of overseas non-English-spoken news broadcasts, non-English-spoken series, non-English-spoken films and overseas sports, together with groundbreaking-but-controversial-shows like South Park and manga-movies. Commercials are in-between shows!

Channel 9, the sports channel. For cricket in the summer and football in the winter, this is where you should be! Commercials every 10 minutes, if you're that lucky.

Channel 7. I must admit, I have no idea what they broadcast except for the Channel 7 news. Commercials every 10 minutes.

Channel 10, the happy-family Fox station. Lots of repeats of the Simpsons (everyday at 18:00, with special one-hour repeats at least twice a week and even one night in the week where they show an all new episode), with soaps like Neighbours and Everybody loves Raymond and no more than seventy flavours of police series, including but not limited to all flavours of Law and Order, CSI and NCIS. Pulp, with commercials every 10 minutes and sometimes a short "one-minute-break" in between.

With the rise of digital television, the ABC and SBS have taken the
opportunity to improve the variaty of their content by taken a
second, digital only, channel. The other channels are just
re-broadcasting their normal channel.

And now the rant

The source for my decision, and this rant, lies in a single movie
I tried to watch: The Battle of Britain. It's a historical movie,
an old movie, slow in acting and in progress of the storyline, But
it's a movie I wanted to watch because of the change in my cultural
environment. Like I said, it's a slow movie, taking 45 minutes what
these days gets pushed in 10 minutes of lousy acting and bad camera
work. But these 45 minutes get interrupted by at least four
commercials, taking you out of the careful orchestrated mood of
looming battles and the upcoming darkness to a happy world of home
loans, end-of-year sales and dieting products. At that moment the
mood is totally scattered. After the first commercial you try to
get into the magic of the movie again, but something is missing.
The darkness doesn't come back so black, the upcoming battles don't
seem to be so serious. Next commercial, and you wonder how many of
them will be there before the end of the movie, and more importantly,
how much more damage they will do to the movie. Next commercial,
and the TV was turned off...

How can the commercial television stations ruin movies like this
without getting serious problems with their conscience?

Posted on 2006-01-16 14:57:20, modified on 2006-01-16 15:24:56
Tags: Music

Remember William Shatner? Starring as Captain James T. Kirk in the
original Star Trek series, atttempting to become a singer with his
"If I had a Hammer", "Mr Tamborine Man" and "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds"... "Enough!" most people would say now, "We admire him
for his Star Trek, not for his music."

He has made a new record, called "Has Been". This time not songs
from others, but from himself. As a man who is with 73 years old
at the end of his life, and wants to come to term with what happened
to him: The memories, the losses, the coming end, his view on life,
Very different styles, very different topics, very different people.
And as you expect from his (in)famous James T. Kirk style of acting,
he's not singing but talking.

If you're interested in a record with challenging songs, or wondering
how a 73 year old can make interesting music, or just are interested
in what William Shatner has made this time, you should download
this record. And when you're in the record shop next time and see
this record, you might be tempted to buy it.